A Flea in Her Ear
Play Description
This classic French farce was written in 1907. It is, perhaps, Feydeau’s best known play, and its intricate choreography draws together two classic farce plots — that of the suspicious wife who sets a trap to expose her faithless partner, and the venerable comic device of mistaken identity.
Production Info
Cast: 14 total (5 female, 9 male)Full Length Comedy (about 200 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“Where does one begin in praising Feydeau? Perhaps with the thrift and beauty of his plotting. The action is propelled by the wrongful belief of the wife of Monsieur Chandebise that he is having an affair. So she lays a trap by getting an old school friend to write a letter tempting Chandebise to a rendezvous at the Hotel Coq d’Or. Unfortunately Chandebise shows it to the friend’s husband, a manic Spaniard who recognises his wife’s writing. From that simple device Feydeau contrives a riotous second act in which the couples, plus the Chandebise household, converge on the seedy hotel … This not only provokes escalating misunderstandings but gives the lead actor a chance to play dual roles … The result is a heartlessly funny evening of whirlwind insanity …” —Michael Billington, The Guardian (London)
Author(s)
Georges FeydeauGeorges Feydeau was born in Paris on December 8, 1862, the son of novelist Ernest-Aimé Feydeau and a Polish woman. He found his first success at the age of twenty-four with TAILLEUR POUR DAMES (LADIES' DRESSMAKER, 1889). That same year Feydeau married Marianne Carolus-Duran, the daughter of the famous portrait painter Carolus-Duran. To Feydeau, the marriage brought wealth that would sustain him until he found greater success. The marriage lasted fifteen years, after which the couple underwent a judicial separation and were formally divorced in 1916. Feydeau began a study of great farces in 1890, studying the works of Eugène Labiche, Henri Meilhac, and Alfred Hennequin. This study brought him success with his play CHAMPIGNOL MALGRÉ LUI (CHAMPIGNOL IN SPITE OF HIMSELF, 1892). Following this, Feydeau made a name for himself both in France and abroad. Among his sixty plays are his famous UNE PUCE À L'ORIELLE (A FLEA IN HER EAR, 1907), LA DAME DE CHEZ MAXIM (THE GIRL FROM MAXIM'S, 1899), and HORTENSE A DIT: "J'M'EN FOUS!" (HORTENSE SAYS, "I DON'T GIVE A DAMN!," 1916). Other notable Feydeau farces are L'HÔTEL DU LIBRE ÉCHANGE (translated as HOTEL PARADISO, 1894) and LE DINDON (SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE, 1896). During the winter of 1918 Feydeau contracted syphilis and slowly descended into madness in the remaining years of his life. He passed away on June 5, 1921.
Kenneth McLeishKenneth McLeish (1940 – 1997) studied Classics and Music at Worcester College, Oxford. After starting as a schoolteacher, he became a full-time translator, author, and dramatist, and in time the most widely respected and prolific translator of drama in Britain. His output included all 47 of the surviving classical Greek plays, most of Ibsen and Feydeau, as well as individual plays by Plautus, Molière, Jarry, Strindberg, Horvath, and Labiche. His original plays and translations have been widely performed, most notably by England's National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
In 1904 the city of Saint Louis hosted a World’s Fair. One event was titled the “University of Man,” meant to celebrate the emerging science of anthropology and popular notions of biological evolution. ‘Race specimens’ from around the world were gathered and brought to Saint Louis to be displayed for the crowds: Indians, Eskimos, Africans and other ‘rare’ races, including, to much acclaim, the pygmies. A young Southerner and self-styled African explorer, Samuel Phillips Verner, traveled to the Belgian Congo as a Special Agent for the Saint Louis Fair. He brought back with him several pygmies. One was Otabenga. The play, based on a true story, recounts the personal journeys of these two men through America at the turn of the 20th century, a society perhaps at the height of its power, its promise, its self-confidence, and its arrogance.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (2 female, 6 male, multiethnic cast)Full Length Drama (about 115 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$19.95–$20.00Collection Description
This collection includes five long one-act plays: THE AWFUL TOOTH, BLASTED EVENT, DEAD WRONG, POTTY FAVORS, and SHE CAN’T BARE IT! Master Belle Époque farceur Georges Feydeau loosely based these brilliantly funny long one-acts on the failure of his own marriage. The plays, greatly admired in his time, were described by a prominent critic as “insane merriment, inextinguishable laughter.” With DEAD WRONG, the first play in the collection, Feydeau launched a new genre: the marital farce, the hell of couples. And “like the very great comic writers,” another critic noted, Feydeau “knows how to make the public laugh at his personal bitterness.” It was Feydeau himself who suggested that these five one-acts be collected under the title FROM MARRIAGE TO DIVORCE. This collection, which for the first time brings these plays together in English, honors that suggestion. Distinguished translator Laurence Senelick has taken care to preserve all of Feydeau’s stage directions as sure guides to staging the plays for maximum effect. DEAD WRONG: A husband and wife stay together by force of habit, their relationship based on nothing solid. The wife’s aggression and bitterness and the husband’s selfishness and irresponsibility are revealed, and their ferocious animosity unleashes such powerful comedy that it obscures the underlying darkness. POTTY FAVORS: Inspired by Feydeau’s wife’s obsession with giving the children laxatives, especially his eldest son, Jacques, every character is despicable for their moral cowardice and egoism, providing a hopeless (but hilarious) environment for child-rearing. SHE CAN’T BARE IT!: What to do about a wife going around the apartment in her nightie until lunchtime? BLASTED EVENT: Trapped in a misalliance, a husband is set upon by his wife, his in-laws, and the midwife. THE AWFUL TOOTH was the last new play of Feydeau to be produced in his lifetime, and its dentist’s chair offers a dose of sadistic hilarity. As translator Laurence Senelick notes, “Feydeau may be to dentists what Molière was to doctors.”
Plays in This Collection
Full Length Comedy (about 200 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
In an imaginary, fantastical land a scholar arrives seeking to find a way to make as many people as he can happy.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (5 female, 11 male, doubling possible, many bit parts)Full Length Comedy (about 130 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00–$19.95Play Description
Often described as Feydeau's masterpiece, THE LADY FROM MAXIM'S charts the trials and tribulations of a certain proper Doctor Petypon who wakes up with a hangover only to find in his bed “The Shrimp,” a dancer at the Moulin Rouge and lady of the night. The Shrimp finds the doctor's lifestyle quite appealing and decides to hang around in spite of the appearance of the doctor's devoutly religious wife, which launches into motion the kinds of farcical twists and turns of deceit and the threats of imminent discovery that no author has ever accomplished with more expertise, panache, and hilarity than Feydeau.
Production Info
Cast: 28 total (11 female, 17 male, doubling possible, extras)Full Length Comedy (about 180 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
Racine's 1677 reworking of Euripides's HIPPOLYTUS, celebrated for its tragic construction and the richness of its language. Consumed by an uncontrollable passion for her young stepson and believing Theseus, her absent husband, to be dead, Phèdra confesses her darkest desires and enters the world of nightmare. When Theseus returns, alive and well, Phèdra, fearing exposure, accuses her stepson of rape. Unable to see beyond her impassioned words to his own son's protestations, heartbroken and overcome, Theseus banishes Hippolytus and wishes him dead. But when the gods are always listening, you should be careful what you wish for.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (5 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
The satirical farce acclaimed as the touchstone for the Dada and Surrealist movements, the Theatre of the Absurd, and much of the rest of experimental theatre in the twentieth century.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
Play Description
Inspired by Feydeau’s wife’s obsession with giving the children laxatives, especially his eldest son, Jacques, every character is despicable for their moral cowardice and egoism, providing a hopeless (but hilarious) environment for child-rearing.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male, 1 child)Short Comedy (about 50 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.95Play Description
The story of a young woman forced into an unhappy marriage to her dull, sickly cousin and smothered by her overbearing aunt. When her husband's childhood friend enters her life, it leads Thérèse into a torrid affair that sets her spirit free for the first time but with shattering consequences. Steeped in the atmosphere of 19th-century France with a darkly rich foreboding.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95Play Description
With a calloused and lustful heart, Don Juan indulges his sexual appetites with boundless enthusiasm. Heedless of warnings both earthly and otherwise, history's most notorious romantic devil rushes headlong toward retribution in Molière's sparkling comedy.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (3 female, 8 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
Molière's satire of intellectual snobbery focuses on the women folk of Chrysale's household, who look on all but intellectual pursuits as worthless and spurn love in favour of learning. The heroine, Chrysale's daughter Henriette, wants to marry Clitandre, but her mother wishes her to marry the poet Trissotin, who is worming his way into the household in order to marry Henriette for her family's fortune. When his avaricious plot is discovered, he is sent away in disgrace, leaving Henriette to marry Clitandre as she wishes.
Production Info
Cast: 13 total (5 female, 8 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00Play Description
Molière's classic comedy comes to uproarious new life in a clever and contemporary adaptation Christopher Bayes and Steven Epp. The traditional story of a girl feigning illness to avoid an unwanted wedding erupts into hilarity when a pretend physician proves that love and laughter remain life's best medicine.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (3 female, 7 male, doubling)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95Play Description
A Count's valet prepares to marry the Countess' chambermaid — until it becomes clear the Count wishes to revive an old law that will allow him to take advantage of the bride before the wedding. The valet's schemes to thwart the Count show the growing French endorsement of an aristocracy of merit and wits rather than birth, in Pierre Beaumarchais' 1784 play.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (4 female, 7 male)Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes